I've argued before that one of the ironies of American education is that K-12 and higher education work under assumptions that are both radically different and uninformed by each other.
One of the most obvious focuses on per-student funding. In public K-12 education, per student funding is a major point of discussion. And while there is debate about exactly how important increasing per-student spending is for student learning, it goes without saying that schools that have more funding per student are able to invest in more learning opportunities, better quality resources, and higher paid teachers than those with lower funding levels. In short, at the K-12 level, per-student funding is about fairness and access to resources.
In American higher education, though, we rarely talk about per-student income as an important indicator of fairness. It is true that representatives from public institutions express concern about declining state subsidies for higher education. But key rankings of colleges and universities are uncritical about the wealth amassed by major universities (public and private). And measures of student learning--the value-added scales of the CLA for example--don't directly take into consideration per student income as a factor. Instead, they predict performance based on student test scores. Indeed, the main discussion that touches on per-student funding is about the cost of higher education. Concern about rising cost is spot-on as far as it goes. But to imagine that financial resources are unimportant for student learning (one implication of the call to reduce the cost of higher education) is to live in a fantasy world.
Enter Professor Roger Brown from Liverpool Hope University. He has calculated an index of the per-student incomes of British universities. The disparity is huge. Cambridge has the highest per-student income, at 65,840 pounds. In comparison, Edge Hill's per-student income is 7,050 pounds. (The disparity in per student net assets is even larger).
Brown makes two points about this disparity. First, he wonders whether it is good for the nation to have such a massive range of institutional wealth, given that the well-being of the nation as a whole depends on having relatively healthy educational opportunities for all of its students.
Second, he notes:
"...there is a basic question of fairness. The better-resourced
universities generally recruit students from better-off backgrounds,
including many educated at private, taxpayer-subsidised, fee-charging
schools. So students who have already had the most spent on them up to
the age of 18 continue to have the most spent on them, reinforcing their
social and educational capital. By the same token, many of their less
favoured state school-educated brethren will continue to have less
available to them."
Of course British higher education differs from American higher ed in significant ways. But certainly the range of per-student income at American colleges and universities would be wider than that at British institutions, given the larger number and more diverse missions of American institutions. But our politics contain no policy recommendations related to that disparity. Instead, the presidential discussions about higher education share naive calls for reducing the cost of higher education and a tempest in a teapot argument about whether private banks or the federal government ought to fund federal student loans. All the while, sources of funding flow to institutions who can bring in major philanthropic donations and research support, or who can catch the eye of venture capitalists.
Nowhere is there a call to shift subsidies from those institutions to institutions whose missions, faculties, and student bodies guarantee that neither the philanthropic rich nor the federal-corporate research nexus will fund them in the future. But if we hope that education will be a way for people to lift themselves out of poverty and unemployment, we should consider such a move.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
Higher education's impoverished talk about work
In my last post I suggested that higher education has failed to keep its talk (and action) about civic engagement up with the experience and needs of students.
We are similarly laggard in the way we talk about and treat work (I've made this point before). On one level, this should be surprising, since a tremendous amount of public discussions in the past 5 years have been about the ability (or inability) of colleges to help students get better jobs. But it is exactly that talk, done almost entirely by people who aren't students, that is the cause of our impoverished talk about work.
When you chat with students about work, this is what you hear:
1. Most of them are working, expect to work through college, and will then continue on in jobs, to be accompanied by periodic bursts of education while they are working.
2. Many of them are skeptical about the future of careers. They aren't confident that their work lives will continue on a path, or that their jobs will build one on another to some sort of pinnacle of employment.
3. Their skepticism about careers frightens and frees them. On the one hand, they fear that they will never be able to pay off student loans. On the other hand, this means that they can select jobs that do not tie them down and that allow them to be creative.
4. Their hope, then, is that this work freedom will lead them to personal freedom.
5. Many hope that their freedom will help them to lead good lives, not lives of corruption and malfeasance, nor lives that are dominated by their jobs.
Put briefly, what students want, then, is not the sort of career guidance we give them (how to network, how to write a resume, how to interview, and access to big-name employers). Parents want that. What students want is work that has meaning.
Colleges and universities, especially secular ones, spend precious little time on making work meaningful. Drop into your career center and you won't see workshops on vocation. Go to an alumni event and you won't talk about right livelihood. Peruse campus jobs and you will see precious little about learning from work. Look at the general education curriculum and you will see no guidance about how to think about work, in spite of the fact that we spend half of our waking lives doing it. Look at universities that explicitly serve working adults. Lots of talk about job placement. Little talk about the meaning of those jobs.
Again, as with civic engagement, it may be that students have moved well beyond us, and that they don't need our help to do this anymore. But as with civic engagement, we are failing in our missions if we don't take work seriously. Learning from, through, and about work (or its analogue, discipline) is, after all, the proper job of educational institutions. If we aren't committed to it, then we aren't committed to our missions.
We are similarly laggard in the way we talk about and treat work (I've made this point before). On one level, this should be surprising, since a tremendous amount of public discussions in the past 5 years have been about the ability (or inability) of colleges to help students get better jobs. But it is exactly that talk, done almost entirely by people who aren't students, that is the cause of our impoverished talk about work.
When you chat with students about work, this is what you hear:
1. Most of them are working, expect to work through college, and will then continue on in jobs, to be accompanied by periodic bursts of education while they are working.
2. Many of them are skeptical about the future of careers. They aren't confident that their work lives will continue on a path, or that their jobs will build one on another to some sort of pinnacle of employment.
3. Their skepticism about careers frightens and frees them. On the one hand, they fear that they will never be able to pay off student loans. On the other hand, this means that they can select jobs that do not tie them down and that allow them to be creative.
4. Their hope, then, is that this work freedom will lead them to personal freedom.
5. Many hope that their freedom will help them to lead good lives, not lives of corruption and malfeasance, nor lives that are dominated by their jobs.
Put briefly, what students want, then, is not the sort of career guidance we give them (how to network, how to write a resume, how to interview, and access to big-name employers). Parents want that. What students want is work that has meaning.
Colleges and universities, especially secular ones, spend precious little time on making work meaningful. Drop into your career center and you won't see workshops on vocation. Go to an alumni event and you won't talk about right livelihood. Peruse campus jobs and you will see precious little about learning from work. Look at the general education curriculum and you will see no guidance about how to think about work, in spite of the fact that we spend half of our waking lives doing it. Look at universities that explicitly serve working adults. Lots of talk about job placement. Little talk about the meaning of those jobs.
Again, as with civic engagement, it may be that students have moved well beyond us, and that they don't need our help to do this anymore. But as with civic engagement, we are failing in our missions if we don't take work seriously. Learning from, through, and about work (or its analogue, discipline) is, after all, the proper job of educational institutions. If we aren't committed to it, then we aren't committed to our missions.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
What auto loans can teach us about student loans
If you were a recent high school graduate, worked hard, got decent grades, and wanted to borrow $20,000, you could spend it on one of two things: a new car or a college education. One of those choices is a much better investment than the other. But while it is almost universally understood that a college education is more valuable than a new car, it is also the case that the means of getting that education--a student loan--is widely feared while the means of getting the car--an auto loan--carries no such stigma.
There are big cultural reasons why this is the case: the contradictory fears that a college education is essential for success in life and inadequate to ensure that success, for example, or the nonsensical political debates about student loan interest rates.
But I am more interested in the practical reasons that auto loans are accepted and student loans feared, because colleges and universities can do something about those practical considerations. Here are five characteristics of auto lending that might be suggestive for student lenders. The characteristics share one factor that ought to be on the mind of people working to fix student loans: auto loans give people power to act in ways they see fit. Student loans, at key points in the college process, make it more difficult, not less, to act.
There are big cultural reasons why this is the case: the contradictory fears that a college education is essential for success in life and inadequate to ensure that success, for example, or the nonsensical political debates about student loan interest rates.
But I am more interested in the practical reasons that auto loans are accepted and student loans feared, because colleges and universities can do something about those practical considerations. Here are five characteristics of auto lending that might be suggestive for student lenders. The characteristics share one factor that ought to be on the mind of people working to fix student loans: auto loans give people power to act in ways they see fit. Student loans, at key points in the college process, make it more difficult, not less, to act.
- Markets in interest rates matter--I can borrow money to buy a new car at 2.94% from my local credit union. Occasionally, manufacturers offer 0% interest. If I had horrible credit, but was willing to follow a strict repayment plan I could still get a loan, albeit at a much higher interest rate. In short, there is a market for auto loans dedicated to making it possible for all sorts of people to buy all sorts of cars. There is no meaningful market for student loans--regardless of your background, career goals, or ability to pay, you pay rates set by a single lender, the federal government, and take out loans in amounts dictated by the federal government. (And because there is no real market for loans, the few private lenders in the business can set their rates even higher than the federal rates.) Markets, when they work correctly, empower people to make informed decisions. The process of getting a student loan is disempowering--all the key factors are out of the buyer's hands--the rate, the amount borrowed, the source of the loan, its term of repayment.
- The size of the loan and the desirability of the purchase coincide--A new car is most desirable when it is new, and so its worth aligns with the amount owed. As the car ages and its value declines, so does the principal. As with cars, a college education is most desirable when it is new, before the hard work, the disappointment, and the frustration of choosing a major, writing a thesis, and facing up to the hard factors of life weigh in. But unlike an auto loan, a student loan's principal is highest when the thing purchased--a college education--is at its end--the moment when satisfaction is often the lowest.
- It is the monthly payment that matters--When you take out an auto loan, the focus of the discussion is on the monthly payment. This focus, of course, obscures the total cost of the loan. But it also helps people budget, since they know that each month for the coming five years they have to pay that amount. In student loans, the monthly payment is a moving target until after graduation. That fact makes budgeting difficult and forces soon-to-be-graduates to make decisions about their futures in a context of uncertainty.
- There is a secondary market for the loan and for the purchase--If you borrow to buy a car, and then decide that the car isn't for you, you can sell it. Selling the car allows you to either invest in another car or pay off your loan early. Or, if you keep the car, other people can use it--brothers, sisters, friends. But there are no secondary markets for college educations or student loans. The loan you take out is yours. You cannot share its amount with a family member. Nor can a friend take classes paid for by your loan. So the social benefit of a student loan and a college education are blunted by the way the loan is constructed.
- An auto loan buys a car; a student loan does not buy an education--You buy a car because you need a car. The thing purchased is directly tied to the money borrowed. But a student loan really buys time in the classroom, not learning or an education. There are no guarantees; you cannot return the education if it isn't working, or get it repaired under warranty. For this reason, if time in college does not lead to learning, the price of the loan seems out of alignment with the value of the thing purchased.
It is my sense, then, that if the government is going to reform student lending, or if student activists are going to take up the issue, that they look to the auto business, where loans align with desires, serve social purposes, come with clear information, and provide freedom to act.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Does education come before employment?
That education precedes employment is a belief so widely held and loudly asserted that it must be, in significant ways, wrong.
And wrong it is. Many young people work while in high school, even more work while in college--some as much as 40 hours a week. This has also been the case historically--hence the academic calendar that affords students time off for the harvest.
But I am even more interested in ways that key movements for social change have made employment a precondition for education, not the other way around.
Jane Addams' Hull House, and other social settlements, set themselves up to help factory workers make meaning out of their working lives by creating formal educational opportunities around the work schedules of their neighbors.
The Greyston Mandala, founded by Bernie Glassman, created a bakery to employ homeless people, and then wrapped Buddhist practice and education around that work. (For a great book on Greyston and its meaning-making, see Glassman's Instructions to the Cook.)
The Delancey Street Foundation takes recently released felons, employs them in its businesses, and uses that employment as a source of learning, of dignity, and direction.
And this recent Fast Company article on Homeboy Industries makes the same point--that regular employment is essential to rehabilitating prisoners, who can then take on a formal education, which expands and contextualizes the human changes that come through work.
All of these examples are of organizations that take people on the margins of society, helping them find "menial" jobs, and using that as the basis of rebuilding their lives.
All of which suggests that educators ought to be much more thoughtful about how their work relates to the work of their students, and build academic programs that are informed by the work lives of their students rather than seeing education as a way to escape the drudgery of labor.
And wrong it is. Many young people work while in high school, even more work while in college--some as much as 40 hours a week. This has also been the case historically--hence the academic calendar that affords students time off for the harvest.
But I am even more interested in ways that key movements for social change have made employment a precondition for education, not the other way around.
Jane Addams' Hull House, and other social settlements, set themselves up to help factory workers make meaning out of their working lives by creating formal educational opportunities around the work schedules of their neighbors.
The Greyston Mandala, founded by Bernie Glassman, created a bakery to employ homeless people, and then wrapped Buddhist practice and education around that work. (For a great book on Greyston and its meaning-making, see Glassman's Instructions to the Cook.)
The Delancey Street Foundation takes recently released felons, employs them in its businesses, and uses that employment as a source of learning, of dignity, and direction.
And this recent Fast Company article on Homeboy Industries makes the same point--that regular employment is essential to rehabilitating prisoners, who can then take on a formal education, which expands and contextualizes the human changes that come through work.
All of these examples are of organizations that take people on the margins of society, helping them find "menial" jobs, and using that as the basis of rebuilding their lives.
All of which suggests that educators ought to be much more thoughtful about how their work relates to the work of their students, and build academic programs that are informed by the work lives of their students rather than seeing education as a way to escape the drudgery of labor.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Should a college presidency be a 24/7 job?
Westminster just completed a search, and hired Dr. Brian Levin-Stankevich as its 17th president. The four finalists varied widely in their backgrounds, their passions, and their visions for the college. But they shared one thing--they all said or intimated that being a college president is a “24/7” job.
Now if 24/7 job is simply shorthand for saying “being a college president takes a lot of time and I understand that” then there is no need to wonder about it. But my sense from this search, and from discussions with other presidents and academic leaders, is that the statement means something more. It means that the president has almost no life outside of the life of the college--that he or she is essentially owned by the school.
The ownership of the President (and other academic leaders) by the institution may not be a bad thing. But it should at least cause the school to ask some questions about its leadership style and assumptions about the role of the college in society. Here are a few key ones:
Now if 24/7 job is simply shorthand for saying “being a college president takes a lot of time and I understand that” then there is no need to wonder about it. But my sense from this search, and from discussions with other presidents and academic leaders, is that the statement means something more. It means that the president has almost no life outside of the life of the college--that he or she is essentially owned by the school.
The ownership of the President (and other academic leaders) by the institution may not be a bad thing. But it should at least cause the school to ask some questions about its leadership style and assumptions about the role of the college in society. Here are a few key ones:
- Have the assumptions and structures of leadership kept up with the literature on leadership? The 24/7 leader grows out of two widely held but dubious models of leadership. The first, dating from the early 1900s, suggests that the corporation should provide all shape to the lives of its employees--housing, food, work, recreation, etc. The second, dating from the 1980s, assumes that the CEO has to be the face of the corporation, and lead through charisma. Both models have been challenged outside of academe, but remain within.
- Does the President have a clearly defined role? Show up at any late-night or weekend event on campus and you will find not one but several leaders--the President, the Provost, the VP for Advancement, the Dean of Students--plus assorted faculty and staff. If they are there because they are interested, wonderful. If they are there out of obligation, then one must ask why? What is it about the presence of many leaders that makes an event more successful? Or is their presence evidence that leaders haven’t determined what their strengths, responsibilities, and roles are? Must the President attend nearly every event on campus?
- Is the President’s calendar planned or reactive? I know from experience that an open week on Monday morning gets filled past capacity by Tuesday lunch. While it is true that stuff happens that must be responded to, it is also true that the President, more than most other people on campus, has limited control over her/his calendar. And much of the time on that calendar is filled with “dignitary work”--shaking hands, greeting visitors, meeting with donors, attending lunches and dinners. Again, this is essential work, but much of it could be done by others, with greater long-term payoff for the college and for other leaders, whose experience grows and whose own special skills come into play.
- Is the campus too busy? Westminster, like many colleges and universities, offers several events, lectures, plays, and sporting events each night. In addition to those things, the leadership has other events to participate in that aren’t open to the campus. But these events, like formal academic programs, need a mission and purpose check. Are the events we host matched with the institution’s mission? And if so, do they advance that mission? Busyness often masks uncertainty about the mission and appeal of an institution. If you aren’t sure where you stand in the market, or what your students need and desire, then you try to have a bit of everything for everyone.
- How serious is your campus about reflection and renewal? We know from the literature on learning and on contemplation that growth and well-being emerge from regular acts of contemplation, reflection, and renewal. If the president is owned by the institution, and moments of reflection and renewal are haphazard (15 minutes here and there, a last-minute weekend escape) then it is evidence that the campus is not as serious about reflection and renewal as it ought to be. (Please note that I do not consider planning and other sorts of “retreats” to be reflective or renewing. They are business, and serve more to summarize work that is already going on and spur more work than they are to provide a space for reflection.Once upon a time most presidents (and other senior leaders) taught a class on campus--today most don’t. But preparing to teach is education’s native contemplative practice. If it is absent, then it may be that contemplation is gone as well.
- Is the college the most important thing in the world? The answer has to be no. No job ought to be more important than family, than citizenship, than god, than happiness. So if a job, even one as important and useful as college president, owns a person, then it is a sign that the job needs to be rethought, if only to bring it into alignment with what humans know about the relative importance of things.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Can higher education be anti-poverty?
Among the disheartening bits of news yesterday was this: that according to the Census Bureau, half of the population of the US is poor or low-income. While there is debate over the definition and meaning of the statistics, they are simply the latest to indicate that income disparity and poverty in the US are high and rising.
One wonders what colleges and universities can do. On the one hand a college education still, on average, is worth a significant amount of money through the life of the graduate. Unemployment is lower among those with degrees than among those without. Many community colleges are deeply committed to job training. And college access as a pathway to economic opportunity is a major issue in higher education.
But job training and access are not the same things as working against poverty. And understanding and reducing poverty are rarely found among college's desired learning outcomes in the way that critical thinking, leadership, sustainability, civic engagement, or understanding diversity are.
Given the ways that colleges and universities work, there do seem to be some clear first steps to mounting an educational attack on poverty. Place the reduction of poverty on the list of a college's goals. Study poverty and work as part of the curriculum, both in majors and in general education. Focus on the application of learning in the workplace. Ensure that entrepreneurship programs are open to students in all disciplines. Guard against the assumption that poverty is solely economic or that wealth is the alternative to poverty. Establish a poverty center that looks and acts like diversity and civic engagement centers. Establish micro-lending programs to aid students. Track poverty as part of alumni surveys. Establish pay scales that narrow the gap between the best-paid and the least-paid employees of the institution. Link poverty reduction to the campus' mission. And keep the issue at the center of the publications, speeches, web content, and reputation of the institution.
One wonders what colleges and universities can do. On the one hand a college education still, on average, is worth a significant amount of money through the life of the graduate. Unemployment is lower among those with degrees than among those without. Many community colleges are deeply committed to job training. And college access as a pathway to economic opportunity is a major issue in higher education.
But job training and access are not the same things as working against poverty. And understanding and reducing poverty are rarely found among college's desired learning outcomes in the way that critical thinking, leadership, sustainability, civic engagement, or understanding diversity are.
Given the ways that colleges and universities work, there do seem to be some clear first steps to mounting an educational attack on poverty. Place the reduction of poverty on the list of a college's goals. Study poverty and work as part of the curriculum, both in majors and in general education. Focus on the application of learning in the workplace. Ensure that entrepreneurship programs are open to students in all disciplines. Guard against the assumption that poverty is solely economic or that wealth is the alternative to poverty. Establish a poverty center that looks and acts like diversity and civic engagement centers. Establish micro-lending programs to aid students. Track poverty as part of alumni surveys. Establish pay scales that narrow the gap between the best-paid and the least-paid employees of the institution. Link poverty reduction to the campus' mission. And keep the issue at the center of the publications, speeches, web content, and reputation of the institution.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Inside leader/outside leader
The search consultant leading the hunt for Westminster's next President was on campus today. In the meeting with him that I attended, he asked a standard question; "Does the college need an inside president or an outside president?"
I know of no other organizational type where the inside/outside dichotomy exists. It has some value in higher education, I suppose, if only to indicate where a leader (it needn't be a President--the question was common during the recent Gore School of Business Dean search as well) will schedule his or her time. And it can elicit a view of a candidate's sense of priorities among problems: a self-described "outside leader" thinks a campus needs more fundraising or prestige lifting; an inside leader thinks the curriculum needs work or peace needs to be won between the faculty and the administration.
But the inside/outside way of thinking hides a major truth--that the leader is one person, and as one person, the leader's approach to the outside and the inside will bear each other's hallmarks. A President comfortable with hierarchies will pursue the wealthy and powerful off-campus and communicate mostly with the Cabinet on-campus. A relationship-builder will win donations with a handshake and a dinner while seeking face-to-face solutions to campus challenges. An indispensable leader will want to touch nearly everything regardless of where it takes place. A collaborator wants more committees on-campus and more advisory boards off-campus.
The problem here, then, is ultimately that the inside/outside dichotomy hides from campus the sort of person taking on the leadership role. If the campus is seeking an outside leader, or if the candidate says "I lead inside" the conversation stops exactly where it should start.
I know of no other organizational type where the inside/outside dichotomy exists. It has some value in higher education, I suppose, if only to indicate where a leader (it needn't be a President--the question was common during the recent Gore School of Business Dean search as well) will schedule his or her time. And it can elicit a view of a candidate's sense of priorities among problems: a self-described "outside leader" thinks a campus needs more fundraising or prestige lifting; an inside leader thinks the curriculum needs work or peace needs to be won between the faculty and the administration.
But the inside/outside way of thinking hides a major truth--that the leader is one person, and as one person, the leader's approach to the outside and the inside will bear each other's hallmarks. A President comfortable with hierarchies will pursue the wealthy and powerful off-campus and communicate mostly with the Cabinet on-campus. A relationship-builder will win donations with a handshake and a dinner while seeking face-to-face solutions to campus challenges. An indispensable leader will want to touch nearly everything regardless of where it takes place. A collaborator wants more committees on-campus and more advisory boards off-campus.
The problem here, then, is ultimately that the inside/outside dichotomy hides from campus the sort of person taking on the leadership role. If the campus is seeking an outside leader, or if the candidate says "I lead inside" the conversation stops exactly where it should start.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
on-campus work and retention
This year, as every year, our campus is looking at retention. Our institutional retention rate has crept up over the past several years; it was 79% last year, our best number ever. As we break down the data, there are two factors that predict retention more than any others--level of previous academic performance, and working on-campus.
Previous academic performance is no surprise, since it tracks with what we know about success in college--if you have done well in school in the past (which is often a factor of high socio-economic status and family culture) you are likely to do well in the future, and likely to say in school.
But on-campus work is different. It doesn't depend on high SES. (In fact, getting a job on campus often depends on having a lower-than-average SES). It is a factor that the school itself can control. Compared with the expense of other retention efforts, it may be relatively cheap. And work can, in fact, have a meaningful impact on learning. (Westminster has begun requiring all on-campus jobs to specify how the job helps students achieve the college's learning goals.)
Students who work on campus at Westminster as freshmen are 6 to 10 percent more likely to be retained than students as a whole. On-campus work isn't a panacea. Schools in the Work Colleges Consortium (where all students work) have retention rates that range from 36% to 82%. But a campus interested in investing in retention would be wise to put its money in student jobs.
Previous academic performance is no surprise, since it tracks with what we know about success in college--if you have done well in school in the past (which is often a factor of high socio-economic status and family culture) you are likely to do well in the future, and likely to say in school.
But on-campus work is different. It doesn't depend on high SES. (In fact, getting a job on campus often depends on having a lower-than-average SES). It is a factor that the school itself can control. Compared with the expense of other retention efforts, it may be relatively cheap. And work can, in fact, have a meaningful impact on learning. (Westminster has begun requiring all on-campus jobs to specify how the job helps students achieve the college's learning goals.)
Students who work on campus at Westminster as freshmen are 6 to 10 percent more likely to be retained than students as a whole. On-campus work isn't a panacea. Schools in the Work Colleges Consortium (where all students work) have retention rates that range from 36% to 82%. But a campus interested in investing in retention would be wise to put its money in student jobs.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Quality of life and the future of the academy
It is worth wondering whether anyone will want to be a college president in 20 years.
(The same question holds for CEOs, college football coaches, and elected officials--all professions that are ever more stressful and ever less likely to feed the passion that led the person into the field in the first place.)
This is partly a demographic concern. According to research by the Council of Independent Colleges, the median age of college presidents is 62, and of chief academic officers, 59. An ever smaller percentage of CAOs want to be presidents, and so the pipeline to the presidency is shrinking to garden-hose size.
It is also a quality of life concern, I would imagine. At least half of the presidents and CAOs who talked to our Senior Leadership Academy group said that a cabinet position is a 24/7 job. The other half intimated the same, and the fact seems to be borne out by the lives of the college presidents and provosts I have observed.
Most of the changes in higher ed over the past 10 years seem to have added to the workload of senior leaders. The intense focus on fundraising eats into evenings and weekends. The broader range of services offered students demands more attention and adds more complexity. Financial problems add more worry, accountability more stakeholders, technology the expectation that senior leaders will be always accessible.
To date the main response to this situation in the US has been to pay academic leaders more as compensation for their additional workload. One doubts, though, that ever-higher salaries will provide strong enough incentives to give up ever greater chunks of time. And even more seriously, one wonders whether a 24/7 lifestyle for the president, provost, cabinet, Dean of Students, center directors, counseling staff, and others across the campus is a sign of a healthy institution.
In saying this I am wondering about two things. The first is whether it is healthy for individuals in these roles to work in this way. There is no evidence that an institution gets the best work out of employees who are constantly on-call (a fact borne out in conversation with these people, who often note that they are exhausted, stressed out, and under-prepared for the issues at hand). Nor is there evidence that the generation that follows mine will be willing to work 70 hour weeks for a college or university.
The second, though, is what work cultures like this say about organizations. Can they cultivate the sorts of people and learning that they claim to do? By expecting this level of commitment are institutions losing out on the sorts of employees would would in fact add the greatest value to the institution?
These are pressing questions if only because we are apparently at a moment of great change in higher education and so the question of work is as much up in the air as are the questions of cost, learning, and the legitimacy of higher education. So perhaps the best way to come at the question of quality of life in the academy is to imagine a new institution that both responds to the future needs of higher education and is host to a healthy work culture.
What would a good learning/good work college look like? Here are a few notions:
(The same question holds for CEOs, college football coaches, and elected officials--all professions that are ever more stressful and ever less likely to feed the passion that led the person into the field in the first place.)
This is partly a demographic concern. According to research by the Council of Independent Colleges, the median age of college presidents is 62, and of chief academic officers, 59. An ever smaller percentage of CAOs want to be presidents, and so the pipeline to the presidency is shrinking to garden-hose size.
It is also a quality of life concern, I would imagine. At least half of the presidents and CAOs who talked to our Senior Leadership Academy group said that a cabinet position is a 24/7 job. The other half intimated the same, and the fact seems to be borne out by the lives of the college presidents and provosts I have observed.
Most of the changes in higher ed over the past 10 years seem to have added to the workload of senior leaders. The intense focus on fundraising eats into evenings and weekends. The broader range of services offered students demands more attention and adds more complexity. Financial problems add more worry, accountability more stakeholders, technology the expectation that senior leaders will be always accessible.
To date the main response to this situation in the US has been to pay academic leaders more as compensation for their additional workload. One doubts, though, that ever-higher salaries will provide strong enough incentives to give up ever greater chunks of time. And even more seriously, one wonders whether a 24/7 lifestyle for the president, provost, cabinet, Dean of Students, center directors, counseling staff, and others across the campus is a sign of a healthy institution.
In saying this I am wondering about two things. The first is whether it is healthy for individuals in these roles to work in this way. There is no evidence that an institution gets the best work out of employees who are constantly on-call (a fact borne out in conversation with these people, who often note that they are exhausted, stressed out, and under-prepared for the issues at hand). Nor is there evidence that the generation that follows mine will be willing to work 70 hour weeks for a college or university.
The second, though, is what work cultures like this say about organizations. Can they cultivate the sorts of people and learning that they claim to do? By expecting this level of commitment are institutions losing out on the sorts of employees would would in fact add the greatest value to the institution?
These are pressing questions if only because we are apparently at a moment of great change in higher education and so the question of work is as much up in the air as are the questions of cost, learning, and the legitimacy of higher education. So perhaps the best way to come at the question of quality of life in the academy is to imagine a new institution that both responds to the future needs of higher education and is host to a healthy work culture.
What would a good learning/good work college look like? Here are a few notions:
- rituals will matter--rituals mark key moments in learning and development. They also signal breaks--changes in practices that renew people and institutions. Consider, for example, Lent and Ramadan, and the way that fasting creates meaning for communities. Colleges could consider their own fasting rituals; all courses but general education courses would be suspended for a month, for example, or all staff would take a meaningful retreat. Sabbaticals will be briefer, but they will also be more common and more significant. Skip your sabbatical at your peril.
- mentoring will be more important--when you talk to people about what they love in education they always mention two things: working with students and learning themselves. Mentoring relationships do just that. In fact, it may be that mentoring, not courses or credit-hours, would be the core competency of good learning/good work institutions.
- more planning at the beginning--by this I mean that students in a good work/good learning school would need to choose and commit to a course of study, a way of learning, and a set of outcomes early on. (For example, I want to study history through a series of individual research projects that will be measured by the publication of my work in a scholarly journal.) This sort of planning both allows for more mentored learning, but also opens the possibility that students will complete their course of study in a briefer period than they do in a regular institution.
- more community, less campus--every college employee I know values the opportunity to work from home. They are more productive, and often more connected during that time, even if they are present for less time. As learning is more easily facilitated by technology, and as people build richer connections with colleagues, it seems likely that college and university staffs will be able to work remotely more and more effectively.
- more lectures--if students will learn more on their own, and work more on their own, then the number of things that need to be conveyed to students will decline. Those that remain--the rich traditions of a place or a discipline, the institution's body of common knowledge, etc.--can be presented more efficiently, through larger lectures delivered by eloquent people.
- more co-curriculum, more focused--I am a big fan of learning in the co-curriculum. I think it is routinely more important than classroom learning for the human and humane components of higher education. A good work/good learning school will demand student participation in the co-curriculum, but will not offer the whole range of co-curricular activities. If the school is focused on environmental sustainability then the co-curriculum focuses there. If it is faith-based, then the co-curriculum is faith-centered.
- learning, not the institution at the core--There are a number of "leader-less organizations" out there. They all lack a person in ultimate charge. Higher ed may want to try such a model, organizing around distributed leadership. In many ways HE is primed for this, in that shared governance is already decentralized. But there are workload and learning implications here as well. The workload implication is that you don't need the president or the provost to be at everything or to vaidate everything. The learning implication is that it is consensus on outcomes, not the authority of the institution, that validates learning. Such a model shares responsibility for leadership and learning more broadly. But more importantly, it puts a common definition of learning at the core of the learning enterprise.
- more mission--Ultimately, good quality-of-life institutions will have to make decisions about what matters and what doesn't. Only clear missions can do that. In their absence, colleges and universities are tempted by every new trend. Or they temporize making decisions about what to cut. Or every decision about every new thing has to be vetted as a one-off, unique opportunity. All of these things take time, and all of them carry the likelihood of expanding the amount of time it takes to manage a successful college.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Is it possible to be an intellectually serious administrator?
I'm not sure this is the right question. I don't mean, by asking it, to imply that the administrators I work with are intellectually un-serious, or that intellectual seriousness is an important characteristic of administrators. (In fact, if one were to rate it, it would have to fall somewhere below "flexible," "tireless," and "good-natured" on the list of desired qualifications.) Nor am I sure that "intellectually serious" is exactly the thing I am wondering about. That thing might be closer to "intellectually wise" than intellectually serious.
The thing I am wondering about is the virtue or characteristic that allows administrators to put things they face into perspective and context, and to make decisions based both on immediate demands and that perspective and context. And it is also the thing that allows administrators to weather their own inevitable mistakes, expedient compromises, failures to communicate, and flights of fantasy in a way that maintains the respect of the faculty, staff, and students. This cluster of virtues I am calling "intellectual seriousness."
The day-to-day life of an academic administrator works against this these things in two ways. First, it demands an intense, sun-up to sun-down focus on the job itself. Most days the first thing I think about is work, and the last thing I think about is work, and in-between it is thinking about work that lurks in the interludes between episodes of actual work.
Second, within that focus on the job, the actual work is undisciplined. It is almost impossible to focus for extended periods of time on a single issue. One hour a meeting may be about curriculum, followed by a quick talk with the college attorney, and then on to a budget discussion, followed by recruiting a student and then lobbying for resources from the Provost. Tossed in may be hallway questions from faculty, and a quick unexpected discussion about assessment, and a call from the CTO.
In contrast, a life of intellectual seriousness is structured in exactly opposite ways. While the administrator's life is narrowly job-focused, an intellectually serious person is curious, her life focused on asking questions, on determining context, on learning the literature. And while the day-to-day practice of an administrator is undisciplined, the life of an intellectually serious person is disciplined--blocks of time put away for teaching, for research, for intellectual attention.
Of course an intellectually serious approach to the life of the college may not do much good for keeping the college flourishing. But given that most administrators were once intellectually serious in their fields, it is worth thinking about how to bring aspects of that former life into the practice of administrators. Much of the weight will fall on those administrators to be sure. I, for one, am appallingly poor at setting aside time for disciplinary focus. So are all of the administrators I work with. I don't know where their minds are before they get to work and after they get home, but my sense is that most of them keep mental companionship with their jobs all the time. These may not be bad characteristics. In most instances colleges and universities get a lot of good work out of people like these, who give themselves over to the hard work of running the institution. I wonder, though, how many institutions miss big opportunities because their administrators have embraced undisciplined focus as a way of work.
Writing this has put me in mind of Kermit Hall. Hall was an important legal historian whose work I studied when I was working on a curriculum revision for the American Heritage Program at BYU. I stepped down from that role to become the Executive Director of Utah Campus Compact. The state Board of Regents invited me to speak to a meeting one spring, and I found myself sitting next to Kermit Hall, who had the year before become President of Utah State University. In a quiet moment I told him how much I admired his work, particularly the Oxford Companion to American Law, which had come out during his presidency at USU. He told me that when he began his administrative career he also began to set aside half a day every week to work on scholarship. He maintained that practice through his presidency at Utah State and through his time at SUNY-Albany where he went after leaving USU.
Hall died of a heart attack while swimming at Hilton Head at the age of 61. He was on vacation at the time. I never worked closely with him--I have no idea what sort of a President he was to work with, or what his institutions missed because he was a scholar. But he was an intellectually serious as an administrator, and that, from my perspective, was a good thing.
The thing I am wondering about is the virtue or characteristic that allows administrators to put things they face into perspective and context, and to make decisions based both on immediate demands and that perspective and context. And it is also the thing that allows administrators to weather their own inevitable mistakes, expedient compromises, failures to communicate, and flights of fantasy in a way that maintains the respect of the faculty, staff, and students. This cluster of virtues I am calling "intellectual seriousness."
The day-to-day life of an academic administrator works against this these things in two ways. First, it demands an intense, sun-up to sun-down focus on the job itself. Most days the first thing I think about is work, and the last thing I think about is work, and in-between it is thinking about work that lurks in the interludes between episodes of actual work.
Second, within that focus on the job, the actual work is undisciplined. It is almost impossible to focus for extended periods of time on a single issue. One hour a meeting may be about curriculum, followed by a quick talk with the college attorney, and then on to a budget discussion, followed by recruiting a student and then lobbying for resources from the Provost. Tossed in may be hallway questions from faculty, and a quick unexpected discussion about assessment, and a call from the CTO.
In contrast, a life of intellectual seriousness is structured in exactly opposite ways. While the administrator's life is narrowly job-focused, an intellectually serious person is curious, her life focused on asking questions, on determining context, on learning the literature. And while the day-to-day practice of an administrator is undisciplined, the life of an intellectually serious person is disciplined--blocks of time put away for teaching, for research, for intellectual attention.
Of course an intellectually serious approach to the life of the college may not do much good for keeping the college flourishing. But given that most administrators were once intellectually serious in their fields, it is worth thinking about how to bring aspects of that former life into the practice of administrators. Much of the weight will fall on those administrators to be sure. I, for one, am appallingly poor at setting aside time for disciplinary focus. So are all of the administrators I work with. I don't know where their minds are before they get to work and after they get home, but my sense is that most of them keep mental companionship with their jobs all the time. These may not be bad characteristics. In most instances colleges and universities get a lot of good work out of people like these, who give themselves over to the hard work of running the institution. I wonder, though, how many institutions miss big opportunities because their administrators have embraced undisciplined focus as a way of work.
Writing this has put me in mind of Kermit Hall. Hall was an important legal historian whose work I studied when I was working on a curriculum revision for the American Heritage Program at BYU. I stepped down from that role to become the Executive Director of Utah Campus Compact. The state Board of Regents invited me to speak to a meeting one spring, and I found myself sitting next to Kermit Hall, who had the year before become President of Utah State University. In a quiet moment I told him how much I admired his work, particularly the Oxford Companion to American Law, which had come out during his presidency at USU. He told me that when he began his administrative career he also began to set aside half a day every week to work on scholarship. He maintained that practice through his presidency at Utah State and through his time at SUNY-Albany where he went after leaving USU.
Hall died of a heart attack while swimming at Hilton Head at the age of 61. He was on vacation at the time. I never worked closely with him--I have no idea what sort of a President he was to work with, or what his institutions missed because he was a scholar. But he was an intellectually serious as an administrator, and that, from my perspective, was a good thing.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Is teaching work? Is learning?
I don't mean to be asking nonsensical questions here, but the more I think about what work means the more I wonder whether teaching and learning, as we usually practice them, are work. Here is what I mean.
By one standard both teaching and learning are work--people get paid to teach (and receipt of pay is one measure of work in capitalism); people put in substantial effort to learn (and the application of effort to a challenge is another measure of work). Work is happening.
But there is uncertainty about teaching, learning, and work in society. Take for example those people who teach on the side because they simply love to teach. Ask them if teaching is work, and they are likely to say no, that teaching is a pleasure, and therefore not work (dissatisfaction with the effort being another sign that something is work rather than, say, leisure). Or ask the critics of schools of education if teaching is work, and they are likely to deny it, suggesting that developing content knowledge is real work; while pedagogy is merely an effort to gussy up a natural human skills with a scientific patina, or to indoctrinate students with "progressive ideologies".
Learning is equally suspect. Our system of education traditionally puts learning before employment, or put another way, before work. And the opportunity to learn is sometimes sequestered from work. Students leave school because they have to work to afford it.
Why does this matter? Because uncertainty about the status of teaching and learning impedes our ability to know if they are happening, and happening well. For example, if teaching is essentially a pleasure for the teacher, then how do we judge its value? What would allow us to say that a four-hour lecture is less effective than four hours spent otherwise? Or if learning is work because it is essentially effort, then why bother to have such a thing as a class? Why not just give students tasks and wish them well?
At the risk of sounding like a fan, I want to suggest that Shop Class as Soulcraft has a lot to teach about the ways in which teaching and learning are work. The most intriguing to me is the notion that work has a particular telos--an end to which it points. In the case of motorcycle repair it is to get the bike running as if it were new--to "fill the measure of its creation" to borrow a phrase from my religious tradition. (For a great poem on this notion read Zbigniew's Herbert's "Pebble."
Pebble
by Zbigniew Herbert
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning
with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye
Translated by Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz
Now I know that essentialism has been on the outs in academe for a long time. But many people, including academics, point to experiences where they felt that they had discovered a bit of their essences as human beings--the characteristics that make them who they are at this time. And it seems to me that if we want to understand teaching and learning as work then we need to attend to those moments where teacher and learner together come across experiences where they jointly discover bits of who they are and truths about how the world works. To push a bit further, I want to suggest that neither teaching nor learning can achieve their teleologies without the other.
Mark those moments that seem like the times when understanding has emerged. ;If Crawford is right in Shop Class then they are the rare moments when work happens. The rest of the time we might be engaged in labor, or effort, or struggle, or leisure, but we haven't yet done any work.
By one standard both teaching and learning are work--people get paid to teach (and receipt of pay is one measure of work in capitalism); people put in substantial effort to learn (and the application of effort to a challenge is another measure of work). Work is happening.
But there is uncertainty about teaching, learning, and work in society. Take for example those people who teach on the side because they simply love to teach. Ask them if teaching is work, and they are likely to say no, that teaching is a pleasure, and therefore not work (dissatisfaction with the effort being another sign that something is work rather than, say, leisure). Or ask the critics of schools of education if teaching is work, and they are likely to deny it, suggesting that developing content knowledge is real work; while pedagogy is merely an effort to gussy up a natural human skills with a scientific patina, or to indoctrinate students with "progressive ideologies".
Learning is equally suspect. Our system of education traditionally puts learning before employment, or put another way, before work. And the opportunity to learn is sometimes sequestered from work. Students leave school because they have to work to afford it.
Why does this matter? Because uncertainty about the status of teaching and learning impedes our ability to know if they are happening, and happening well. For example, if teaching is essentially a pleasure for the teacher, then how do we judge its value? What would allow us to say that a four-hour lecture is less effective than four hours spent otherwise? Or if learning is work because it is essentially effort, then why bother to have such a thing as a class? Why not just give students tasks and wish them well?
At the risk of sounding like a fan, I want to suggest that Shop Class as Soulcraft has a lot to teach about the ways in which teaching and learning are work. The most intriguing to me is the notion that work has a particular telos--an end to which it points. In the case of motorcycle repair it is to get the bike running as if it were new--to "fill the measure of its creation" to borrow a phrase from my religious tradition. (For a great poem on this notion read Zbigniew's Herbert's "Pebble."
Pebble
by Zbigniew Herbert
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning
with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye
Translated by Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz
Now I know that essentialism has been on the outs in academe for a long time. But many people, including academics, point to experiences where they felt that they had discovered a bit of their essences as human beings--the characteristics that make them who they are at this time. And it seems to me that if we want to understand teaching and learning as work then we need to attend to those moments where teacher and learner together come across experiences where they jointly discover bits of who they are and truths about how the world works. To push a bit further, I want to suggest that neither teaching nor learning can achieve their teleologies without the other.
Mark those moments that seem like the times when understanding has emerged. ;If Crawford is right in Shop Class then they are the rare moments when work happens. The rest of the time we might be engaged in labor, or effort, or struggle, or leisure, but we haven't yet done any work.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The geography of extra work
This has been a season for thinking about extra work in higher education. We are hiring adjuncts for fall--many of them in the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business are executives who also teach a course or two. At the college, nearly every adjunct also has another job (or two, or three). New projects that pop up have to be taken on by existing employees--it is too late to do searches for fall (hence my second job as Interim Dean). Faculty are finding projects to supplement their incomes--consulting, facilitating meetings, joining new initiatives, etc.
Though these types of extra work are disparate, they share two characteristics. First, they all use pay as an incentive to encourage people to take on work that is not in their main job description. A small point to be sure, but one that is increasingly common in higher education, where a little bit of pay is the central form of encouragement to try new things.
Second, when people talk about this type of work, they always use a geographical metaphor. They are doing work "on top of" their regular assignments. Or they are doing the additional work "on the side." Or they are picking up work "here and there."
What does this connection between geography and work mean? It seems to indicate that whatever our jobs, we conceive of them in space--the assignments in a geographical relationship to each other (as opposed, I guess, to temporal relationships or relationships based on priority.) It also means that this extra work is just that--extra, not part of the core of what we do.
I am particularly intrigued by the use of the phrase "on the side." It has had negative connotations. Consider, for example, the way we say that an unfaithful spouse has a lover "on the side" or the connotation that side-work is secondary. But the phrase is getting some rehabilitation in the call for faculty to move from being "Sage[s] on the stage" to "guide[s] on the side." In that use of the phrase, being on the side is a good thing, something that allows others (students) to take responsibility for their work.
I wonder if there is possibility in that use for all of us who take on work "on the side." It is worth asking whether there is anything in the view of work encapsulated in "guide on the side' that suggests how we can do extra work. Perhaps as work moves more to the side the person responsible must be more facilitative than directive. Or perhaps where several people are working on side projects, we would be wise to follow the model of collaborative work on the internet, where, to use Clay Shirky's phrase, we contribute from our cognitive surplus to projects of which no one is in charge. Or it could simply suggest that the more work we do on the side, the less centered our work is, for good or ill.
Though these types of extra work are disparate, they share two characteristics. First, they all use pay as an incentive to encourage people to take on work that is not in their main job description. A small point to be sure, but one that is increasingly common in higher education, where a little bit of pay is the central form of encouragement to try new things.
Second, when people talk about this type of work, they always use a geographical metaphor. They are doing work "on top of" their regular assignments. Or they are doing the additional work "on the side." Or they are picking up work "here and there."
What does this connection between geography and work mean? It seems to indicate that whatever our jobs, we conceive of them in space--the assignments in a geographical relationship to each other (as opposed, I guess, to temporal relationships or relationships based on priority.) It also means that this extra work is just that--extra, not part of the core of what we do.
I am particularly intrigued by the use of the phrase "on the side." It has had negative connotations. Consider, for example, the way we say that an unfaithful spouse has a lover "on the side" or the connotation that side-work is secondary. But the phrase is getting some rehabilitation in the call for faculty to move from being "Sage[s] on the stage" to "guide[s] on the side." In that use of the phrase, being on the side is a good thing, something that allows others (students) to take responsibility for their work.
I wonder if there is possibility in that use for all of us who take on work "on the side." It is worth asking whether there is anything in the view of work encapsulated in "guide on the side' that suggests how we can do extra work. Perhaps as work moves more to the side the person responsible must be more facilitative than directive. Or perhaps where several people are working on side projects, we would be wise to follow the model of collaborative work on the internet, where, to use Clay Shirky's phrase, we contribute from our cognitive surplus to projects of which no one is in charge. Or it could simply suggest that the more work we do on the side, the less centered our work is, for good or ill.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
What about work?
(For the next while I am trying a new approach to this blog. Each Monday I will post on a particular theme for the week. Any posts that follow during the week will expand on the theme; the following Monday I'll write about a new theme. Trying to put a bit of organization to my writing here, in hopes that it eventually adds up to something in addition to discrete mini-essays on learning...This week's theme is Work.)
With all of the attention higher education gives to getting graduates employed, it is astonishing how little interest we have in work. By this I mean simply that it is rare for an institution to help its students consider what work is, how it shapes human beings, and how it gives meaning to life. I cannot think of any college (though I am sure there are some) that requires courses about the meaning of work, only a few campuses that consider the learning that comes from employment while in school, and only an handful of business programs that attend to the questions about justice, human fulfillment, and the social good that emerge from the way that employers structure work.
This issue is on my mind for several reasons. I've spent the past 18 months on a task force working to connect student employment at Westminster to the college's learning goals. Our hope is that every student who works on campus will have a job that leads to learning, and that that learning will be of value to the student. My wife's job currently requires 14 hour days and weekend work, with almost no consideration of the toll a workload like that takes on her, us, or the quality of her work. And I have been asked to take on a major additional assignment at the college, serving as Interim Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business, an assignment that raises questions about my ability to complete good quality work while maintaining the balance and clear-sightedness that might make it possible to do that work.
Our inattention to work is not for lack of meaningful content to study. The meaning of work is a core concern of many major religions (right livelihood in Buddhism; the notion of a holy day of rest in Western religions); assumptions about it undergird Marxism and Capitalism; the topic is more universally experienced by students than anything except sleep.
What is more, the recent economic downturn has pushed the meaning of work to the fore of American culture. I had lunch last week with two former students, honors graduates of the college, recipients of graduation awards, perhaps the two most civically engaged students I have ever known. Neither has full-timer permanent work. One works temporarily for the state doing field biology; the other takes tickets at the local aviary. Work is a huge issue for them--they both have large amounts of student debt, but they both also want to live decent lives and be part of the human conversation rather than structuring their lives around their jobs. And on a more abstract level, the problem of work is at the center of some of the most influential books published in the past year--Rework and Shop Class as Soulcraft among them.
I don't have any idea about how to insert (or is it re-insert) the study of work into the curriculum. But it seems that if faculty, staff, administrators, and students do not take up the questions that come out of work seriously then our institutions are failing our students, and we are failing ourselves.
With all of the attention higher education gives to getting graduates employed, it is astonishing how little interest we have in work. By this I mean simply that it is rare for an institution to help its students consider what work is, how it shapes human beings, and how it gives meaning to life. I cannot think of any college (though I am sure there are some) that requires courses about the meaning of work, only a few campuses that consider the learning that comes from employment while in school, and only an handful of business programs that attend to the questions about justice, human fulfillment, and the social good that emerge from the way that employers structure work.
This issue is on my mind for several reasons. I've spent the past 18 months on a task force working to connect student employment at Westminster to the college's learning goals. Our hope is that every student who works on campus will have a job that leads to learning, and that that learning will be of value to the student. My wife's job currently requires 14 hour days and weekend work, with almost no consideration of the toll a workload like that takes on her, us, or the quality of her work. And I have been asked to take on a major additional assignment at the college, serving as Interim Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business, an assignment that raises questions about my ability to complete good quality work while maintaining the balance and clear-sightedness that might make it possible to do that work.
Our inattention to work is not for lack of meaningful content to study. The meaning of work is a core concern of many major religions (right livelihood in Buddhism; the notion of a holy day of rest in Western religions); assumptions about it undergird Marxism and Capitalism; the topic is more universally experienced by students than anything except sleep.
What is more, the recent economic downturn has pushed the meaning of work to the fore of American culture. I had lunch last week with two former students, honors graduates of the college, recipients of graduation awards, perhaps the two most civically engaged students I have ever known. Neither has full-timer permanent work. One works temporarily for the state doing field biology; the other takes tickets at the local aviary. Work is a huge issue for them--they both have large amounts of student debt, but they both also want to live decent lives and be part of the human conversation rather than structuring their lives around their jobs. And on a more abstract level, the problem of work is at the center of some of the most influential books published in the past year--Rework and Shop Class as Soulcraft among them.
I don't have any idea about how to insert (or is it re-insert) the study of work into the curriculum. But it seems that if faculty, staff, administrators, and students do not take up the questions that come out of work seriously then our institutions are failing our students, and we are failing ourselves.
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